Description:

Please join us on Friday, February 20 at 12:30pm in the Trienens Forum (Kresge 1515) for a lecture by Professor Craig Williams. Lunch will be provided starting at 12:15pm. The abstract for the talk can be found below.

After a brief introduction to the ongoing history of Indigenous North American writers' engagements with Greek and Roman antiquity, in this lecture I discuss two Native rights advocates active in the Chicago area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first is Simon Pokagon (Potawatomi), who delivered a speech at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition subsequently published under the title Red Man’s Rebuke, and whose semi-autobiographical novel Queen of the Woods was published in 1899. The second is Wassaja, also known as Carlos Montezuma, a Yavapai graduate of the University of Illinois (BS 1884), for several decades a practicing physician in Chicago, and editor and publisher of the monthly newsletter Wassaja: Freedom's Signal for the Indian (1916-1922). I will show how Pokagon’s and Montezuma’s uses of Greece and Rome illustrate some major themes in the history of Native writing to this day, such as talking back, resilience, and survivance.